THE INFORMATION THEORY OF THE FEDERALIST

In December of 1787, Alexander Hamilton broke new ground in the public-relations campaign to persuade the American states of the merits of the proposed Constitution. His defense of federal power that we now know as Federalist 23 landed in four newspapers in two days: in the New York Packet and the New York Journal on the 18th, and the next day in the Independent Journal and the Daily Advertiser. It was the first essay in the Federalist series to appear in that many newspapers, and it presumably reached the largest audience since Madison, Hamilton, and Jay began their media blitz in October. That kind of multioutlet exposure would even please a modern political communications director, although Hamilton's demands on the reader would hardly pass muster against modern standards of political rhetoric.

In his essay, Hamilton used a remarkable phrase to describe the proposed government. The new government was to be the center of information for the new nation. Hamilton had in mind a far-sighted idea: that the distribution of political information is important to the health of democracies, and that one of the several advantages of a large, federal republic over a system of confederated states was its superior informational properties. Hamilton believed that the U.S. government would elicit a healthier flow of information than the system under the Articles of Confederation, and would better wed that information to representation and policy making.